


The Fifth Stage

by Jayne L (JayneL)



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Comes Back Wrong, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-11
Updated: 2017-06-11
Packaged: 2018-11-12 15:39:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11164926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JayneL/pseuds/Jayne%20L
Summary: cosmictuesdays said: "Is there a fic exploring the idea of how [Dawn and Spike] would take care of Buffy if she’d Come Back Wrong?"A canon-divergent version of 'After Life'.





	The Fifth Stage

**Author's Note:**

> cosmictuesdays won me in Tumblr's Fandom Trumps Hate auction and sent me [this post](http://cosmictuesdays.tumblr.com/post/156381394256/is-there-a-fic-exploring-the-idea-of-how-these-two) as a prompt. Many thanks to Hannah for supporting The Nature Conservancy and giving me a meaty premise to dig into.
> 
> Content warning: at a couple points in this story, Dawn gets a little ableist in her thinking.

Buffy trails Dawn home like a puppy. A silent, stunned puppy. Her hair and dress are caked with dirt; her face and hands are smeared with it. Her fingernails are ragged and broken, her knuckles scraped and bloody.

Dawn's not an idiot. The dress is the one she picked out for Buffy to be buried in. The dirt is grave dirt. It's nowhere near the first time Dawn's seen her sister's hands busted up after a rough patrol or skirmish or apocalypse.

Whatever brought Buffy back didn't make it easy. She had to fight for it.

She needs encouragement to get out of her burial dress and into the shower. She stays motionless under the spray for a long time before actually washing, which she does sparely, haltingly; she fumbles with the shampoo and body wash bottles like they're unfamiliar in her hands. She stands like a mannequin while Dawn wraps her in the fluffiest towel she can find and dries her off. She takes the hairbrush Dawn hands her, but holds it like she doesn't know what it's for until Dawn takes it back and goes to work on her tangles.

"It's okay, Buffy," Dawn tells her, soft and careful and as reassuring as she can be while her skin prickles and crawls, every part of her that's ached for months to have Buffy back recoiling from everything that feels _not right_ now that she is. "You're home now. It's over, okay? You made it. You're here."

Buffy stares at herself in the mirror like she doesn't know what she's seeing.

* * *

Willow is anxious, and under the anxiety is frustration. Buffy sits silently on the couch staring at nothing, and Willow stands over her like she's waiting for something, and the longer Buffy doesn't do whatever it is Willow's waiting for the more anxious and frustrated Willow gets.

Just like that, Dawn knows.

"You did this," she says, cutting through everyone else's nervous babble. The anger in her voice surprises even her. "What did you do?"

Tara, Xander, and Anya all look at Willow. Willow's hands flutter at her sides. "A spell. We--we did a spell."

All Dawn can think about are the awful, muddled, lonely days right after Mom died. The stink of the ghora egg when it cracked open, strong enough that Dawn gagged over her cauldron. The little smile on the old man's face when he explained the resurrection spell.

The little smile he wore at the top of Glory's tower as he made his neat slices into Dawn's stomach.

Willow fills Dawn's silence. "We couldn't just leave her there, so--I found a spell, and--and we did it." Her hands fall still. Her anxiety falls away, and for a moment, she's nothing but proud. "We got her out."

Buffy laughs. Dawn's heart leaps. She turns, and Buffy's face is lit up, her mouth stretched in a grin that pries at her cheeks but doesn't reach her eyes, a low, quiet chuckle rolling out of her like it's never going to stop. Until it does, as suddenly as it began. The grin fades, and then she's blank again.

"...Buffy?" Dawn asks, but Buffy's standing and walking to the stairs, climbing them like a zombie, leaving them all behind.

* * *

Dawn doesn't sleep well.

Neither do Willow and Tara. Dawn hears them talking for a long time, their voices low through the walls.

When Dawn tilts her head toward her open bedroom door and closes her eyes, focuses on Buffy's room down the hall and concentrates--when she listens for any bed-creak or rustle or breath to signal it's her sister in that room again, not the bot--she doesn't hear anything at all.

She wakes with a jolt to sunlight warming her window, a bird whistling lazily outside. A glance at her clock says it's just after six. The house is quiet.

Dawn doesn't feel like she slept. Even with the blink from midnight dark to morning light, she doesn't really trust that she did. Staring at her window, she thinks about closing her eyes again, thinks about how sometimes it's easier to sleep in the morning because all the worries you couldn't be distracted from in the dark poof like vampires in the light. But the thought of staying in bed when Buffy might have had a good sleep, might be feeling better today, might want to have breakfast and a hug and hear about everything that's happened, everything she missed, has Dawn kicking off her blankets and slipping out of her room.

She's taken three whole steps down the hall when something bounces off her toe and pings off the baseboard. Stopping, she bends down and picks up a--something. Small, round, black. Plastic.

She closes her fist around it. It's junk, maybe a button that fell off someone's shirt, but it's hard like a Lego and she's lucky she didn't step right on it in her bare feet. She means to veer off into the bathroom to throw it out, but as she's standing up she glances back towards Buffy's room and sees a little heap of something on the floor just inside the open door. Unease worms to life in her belly; she doesn't really know why. She creeps carefully forward until she can see into the room.

Buffy's in her bed, eyes closed and breathing deeply. She's still in the button-up shirt Dawn picked out for her to wear after her shower yesterday. Her covers are rumpled around her like she's been fighting demonic hordes all night. Dawn feels a warm twinge in her chest: it's not the bot lying there. The bot never closed its eyes, or mussed the covers, or had bedhead. It's _Buffy_ , and it's a long moment before Dawn can tear herself away from the sight of her to look down.

The thing on the floor is pink and white, bunched and ragged-edged. Dawn crouches to get a closer look, frowning. She doesn't realise what it is until she reaches out and touches it, knocking it so it tips to reveal one little black plastic eye hanging from a thread above a deflated snout.

It's Mr Gordo. What's left of him. His love-worn fuzzy skin has been ripped at the seams; his puffy stuffing's been yanked out and yanked apart. The mess of him was thrown down like litter, torn up and cruel.

* * *

They're watching TV when Giles gets back.

Well, they're sitting on the couch, facing the TV, which is on. But Dawn's too aware of Buffy beside her--alive and right there, but so silent, so _absent_ \--to have any idea why the laugh track keeps kicking in. And Buffy's expression never changes from the placid vacant gaze she's worn since she came back. Since that one time she laughed.

So who knows whether it really counts as "watching TV".

Giles looks like he didn't get any sleep on the plane, or at any other time over the week since he left Sunnydale. When Dawn hugs him, he smells like canned air and sweat and a worrying hint of booze, but just him being there--it helps. Giles will know what to do. Or, at least, he'll know how to find out what to do.

She smiles at him, nervy and flickering, before turning to the couch. "Buffy, look who's here."

It takes her a second. It always does now, like her name has to tunnel in deep before she can hear it. But then Buffy turns her head, and her empty eyes look through Giles the way she looks through everything now, and Giles makes this noise, this low, hitched breath that Dawn blinks hard at and pretends she didn't hear.

"Dinner's almost ready," she says, after the silence-that's-not has gone from uncomfortable to painful. Her voice sounds weird, too high, against the noise coming from the TV. She doesn't like it, but when she keeps talking, she can't make it sound any different. "Stir-fry with chicken and rice. Are you hungry?"

Giles stares at Buffy a little longer before looking at Dawn, then away, taking off his glasses and fumbling in his pocket for a cloth, blinking rapidly. "Oh. Oh, yes. Yes, dinner would--would be nice, thank you."

They sit around the dining room table, Willow and Tara on one side, Buffy and Dawn on the other, Giles on the end that isn't covered in Willow's computer stuff. It hasn't been that long since the last time they all ate together--most of them, anyway-- but Dawn keeps thinking it feels strange. Formal, almost. Stilted. Like there's an actual grown-up at the table, so everyone should be on their best behaviour.

When the food's been served and Buffy's still just sitting there staring past Willow's shoulder, Dawn picks up Buffy's fork and picks up Buffy's hand and wraps Buffy's fingers around the handle. "If you get her started she usually keeps going on her own," she tells Giles, feeling weirdly like it's more apology than explanation. Like Buffy's not on her best behaviour, and something has to be said to excuse her lapse of manners.

"Ah," is all Giles says, and he watches Buffy slide her fork into the pile of food on her plate and lift it to her mouth and chew slowly, vacantly. Mechanically. He forgets to eat any himself until she's gone through the motions again.

It's good stir-fry. Dawn likes it, when she takes her first bite, but soon she's shuffling it around on her plate more than anything else. She's not really hungry. She hasn't been, lately.

Giles is describing his meeting with the Watchers' Council--"Very businesslike. Very...detailed."--when Buffy speaks.

"No!"

Dawn's hand jerks where she was reaching for her water glass. It tips, but no one pays attention to the water spreading through the tablecloth. That's the first thing Buffy's said--the first actual word--since the few broken sentences she rasped out when Dawn found her at Glory's tower. She's staring at her fork. At her hand fisted around her fork, white-knuckled and straining so tightly it shakes.

Hesitant, her heart caught hard in her chest, Dawn says, "Buffy...?" and Buffy's hand releases in a spasm. The fork clatters on her plate, and she turns her head, and her eyes--

\--her eyes are _white_ , and her mouth is grinning, ugly, _vicious_ \--

\--and Buffy's hand is in her hair, twisting and yanking, and the table is rushing up, and pain explodes through Dawn's head and her vision blanks and her ears ring and there's shouting, scrambling, laughing--

* * *

"Thaumogenesis," Giles says.

Dawn's head throbs. Her ice pack is nearly all melted now, the bruise on her temple is tender, and the pounding behind her eyes is thick and dull. Slumped on her stool at the kitchen counter, she struggles to stay focused as Giles explains that the spell to bring Buffy back didn't just bring Buffy back. It was too powerful just to resurrect; it created, too. It gave what was wanted--Buffy--but it required that something unwanted be given, as well.

"It's a demon," he finishes, glasses off and gaze averted. Dawn doesn't know if he's really angry, really sad, or really, really tired. She can't figure out what she's feeling, either, or their proportions. "Created by the spell, embodied as Buffy was in the process of resurrection."

"So we need to uncreate it, right?" Xander looks at Giles expectantly. "Exorcise the hitchhiker and send it back to the hell dimension from whence it came?"

"It's not that simple." Giles' glasses stay in his hand. "Un-making the demon would require undoing the spell. Buffy--Buffy would--"

A feeling like freezing water trickles down the back of Dawn's neck. Willow completes the thought, her face ashen: "Buffy would be sent back, too."

"Try it, Red," Spike says where he's leaning against the basement door, arms crossed and eyes glittering like he'd be able to stop any of them from getting past him. It's the first time he's spoken since he helped get Buffy contained. "You'll be dead before my aneurysm hits."

Willow glares. "I'm not going to try it!"

"Buffy's in there." Dawn's hand hurts where it's clenched around the ice pack. She lowers it to the counter and forces her fingers to let go. She looks from Willow to Giles and back again, trying not to let the frantic fear rising in her throat quaver into her voice. She needs them to take her seriously. She needs them to understand. "She's fighting it. If she weren't, I'd be dead right now."

"Buffy protected her," Spike adds. Dawn could hug him. "She pulled its punch."

"What if she kicks the demon out?" Anya asks. "She could do that, right? It is her body."

"I believe she's trying," Giles says. "The catatonia--I believe it's the result of all of Buffy's efforts being focused inward as she works to control and expel her--ah--unwanted guest."

"And if she does?"

Giles puts his glasses back on. Something in Dawn relaxes, ever so slightly. "In theory, if Buffy can evict the demon, it should lose its tether to this plane of existence and, well--"

"Return from whence it came," Xander finishes.

"Yes. But...whether she'll succeed..."

"She's not staying in the basement." Everyone turns to look at Dawn. She makes herself sit up straight and still. "We're not keeping her locked up."

The others exchange a glance, the one they always do when they think she's being a dumb kid who can't possibly understand something. Dawn hates that glance. Gently, Tara begins, "Dawnie, it's not safe--"

"It's Buffy. She won't let it hurt us. Not--" Again. Fatally. "--seriously. But she needs to be in her room, in the house. She needs to be comfortable, and with us, and treated like a person." Dawn's headache gets worse at the volume of her voice and the intensity in her body, the tension of how important this is, but she doesn't care. She understands, probably better than they do. She knows she's right about this. "How's she supposed to fight to be _Buffy_ if we make her feel like some evil _thing_?"

* * *

Buffy's curled up still and small in the corner of the basement. She puts no strain on the thick, heavy chain that runs from the iron loops in the wall to the giant shackles around her wrists. She doesn't turn toward the sound of feet on the stairs, or look up as Dawn approaches. She stares straight ahead, blank.

When Dawn kneels beside her and reaches for the padlock, she starts moving her hands. Not a lot, and not to any purpose Dawn can see until she realises that each small, directionless shift makes the chain get in the way of Dawn's attempts to open the lock. "It's okay," she says, ducking her head, trying to catch Buffy's eye. "We know it wasn't you. And we know you're stronger than it is."

Buffy stares at nothing. Her hands keep moving.

Dawn bites her lip. She's painfully aware of the bruise on her forehead, and of Giles and Willow and Spike and Xander crowded on the stairs behind her, watching. Waiting for the demon to prove that this is a bad idea.

The key is heavy in Dawn's hand, as solid and no-nonsense as the padlock. She squeezes it in her fist until its jagged teeth dig into her palm. Leaning in close, she whispers, "I know I said it was over, Buffy. I was wrong. I know you're still fighting. And I know you can win."

Like a wind-up toy winding down, Buffy's hands go still.

* * *

The demon's a jerk.

It follows up the Mr Gordo carnage by ripping up half a drawer of clothes, a commemorative programme from some ice-dance show, some pictures of Buffy, Willow, and Xander from highschool, an old book of poetry that Dawn thinks might have been a gift from Angel, and the afghan Mom used to like for naps.

It doesn't hurt Buffy. "I don't believe it can," Giles says, his hands full of torn-up figure skating action shots, a look Dawn can't decipher on his face. "Not without jeopardizing its foothold in this dimension."

It doesn't lay a finger on anyone else again, either.

* * *

Willow finds another spell.

She and Tara come home from the Magic Box one afternoon and take Dawn out onto the back porch and tell her they think they can help Buffy get rid of the demon.

Dawn's heartbeat skips, then pounds. "What? How?"

Full of determination, Willow says, "We're going to summon it."

It's like the demon's burrowed into Buffy, they explain. It's dug in so deep that pushing it out is really hard, because Buffy has to get it all the way up through the burrow before she can even try to kick it out. But if there were something pulling on the demon from outside...

"Maybe we can pull it up far enough that Buffy can push it the rest of the way out," Dawn reasons, and Willow and Tara nod. "Are you sure it'll work?"

Something flickers across Willow's face, there and gone. Impatience, maybe. Irritation. "I can make it work," she says, and something in her tone makes Dawn feel like a little kid who just asked a stupid question.

Tara must hear it, too: she glances sidelong at Willow before adding, "We researched it really thoroughly, and we talked it over with Giles. Basically, it'll be like an exorcism, only the magic won't include the intention to send the demon away. That's the part that would undo the resurrection spell."

Willow squares her shoulders and raises her chin. "It'll work," she says confidently.

Over Willow's shoulder, Dawn can see through the window into the living room, where Buffy and Spike are sitting on opposite ends of the sofa watching Passions. Spike reacts to something on the TV: his face twists into a sneer, his hand rises in a gesture of disbelief, and he looks expectantly at Buffy like he's looking for her to chime in. When she sits still and stares into the middle distance and doesn't seem to have noticed a thing, he turns back to the TV, subsiding.

Passions had always been Mom's show. Buffy'd never had patience for it. The few times she'd sat down to try to watch an episode, she'd either hit her limit early on and left, or snarked too many times and been banished.

"Do it," Dawn says, as if they were asking.

* * *

They clear a space in the living room. Willow and Tara make a summoning circle, pouring consecrated salts and placing pungent candles while they murmur protective incantations. They leave a tiny gap in the circle's border, just enough to let the demon cross from outside to in.

When Giles goes upstairs to get Buffy, Xander turns to Dawn. "You sure you don't wanna skip the demony part, Dawnie? The offer to go for ice cream's still open."

They've discussed this already. Twice before, actually, both times more argument than discussion. Dawn's getting really tired of people calling her 'Dawnie' in that tone of voice. "I'm staying," she says, firm against the nerves that are making her hands cold and clammy. When the others exchange uneasy looks, she crosses her arms and glares. "I'm not. Leaving."

Part of her is sure they'll make her go anyway. She spent most of last night steeling herself to kick and scream and _hurt_ if they tried to drag her out of the room.

When they nod and let her stay, she doesn't know if she's relieved.

If the demon knows what they're going to do, it doesn't show: Buffy drifts down the stairs as easily and emptily as she's gone anywhere since she came back, Giles behind her, Spike trailing them both. When they steer her into the living room, she goes without hesitation to the edge of the circle.

She stops there. She stands immobile.

Dawn holds her breath.

When Buffy lifts her foot and steps cleanly across the salt line, it looks deliberate. She places herself in the centre of the circle and turns to face everyone, and it feels defiant. As Tara fills the gap in the sand, sealing the circle closed, Dawn breathes out, encouraged, hope threading warm and tender through the anxious knot in her belly.

The summoning spell makes the candle flames burn green, makes the air hum, makes a breeze Dawn can't feel ruffle Buffy's shirt and play with her hair. Buffy's eyes slip shut while Willow and Tara and Giles chant. She sways in the localised wind.

The chanting stops. The wind inside the circle dies down. Buffy stands motionless, still and relaxed. As if she could sleep standing up, Dawn thinks. Peaceful.

"I can feel you." It's Buffy's voice, but it's not Buffy speaking. It scrapes at Dawn's spine like fork tines scraping across an empty plate. Buffy's eyes open, and they're white. Her mouth quirks meanly at the corners. "Your grasping fingers. Prying. Always prying, aren't you, witch?"

Dawn spares a glance at Willow. Her face is set: part concentration, part fury. Her hands are clawed at her sides, holding the power of the spell.

"Moving the pieces like you know where they go," the demon drawls. "Push this one, pull that. Pat the head, cut the throat. Steal the soul."

The green flames shiver around the circle. Something like vapour starts to seep out of Buffy's skin, oozing sluggishly from her pores. It looks dirty, the ugly grey-yellow of cigarette-stained fingernails. The mocking smile falls from Buffy's face. "Idiot child," the demon spits, sharp now, spiteful. "You think you won her free from Hell? _You dragged her out of Heaven._ "

Willow falters. Dawn goes lightheaded, then flashover hot. There's a buzzing in her skull, deep and thick in her ears.

Buffy blinks and when her eyes open they're her eyes, not the demon's. She starts grabbing at the smoke that clings to her, tearing at it, ripping it away. It comes faster, rising and roiling in the currents her hands make, little wisps of it curling up and evaporating the farther it drifts from her body.

Buffy's hand clenches on her breastbone, the tendons in her fingers straining so hard Dawn thinks they'll snap. Her head drops on her shoulders, and she tenses, and when she pulls her hand away from her chest a sound wrenches out of her along with the demon, half-shout half-groan, hoarse and hurting and horrible.

The demon is small, barely the size of a ragdoll hanging in Buffy's grip, her fist tight around its throat. Scrawny and cringing, the same old-bone colour all over. Long, stringy hair. Big white eyes in a desiccated face that would look sickeningly like Buffy's if it were flesh and bone.

Buffy throws it to the floor. On impact, its already-dissipating body wisps into nothingness.

The entire world stands still.

Willow's breath hitches, loud in the silence. "It's not true," she says, and her voice is small and tearful. "It's not true, Buffy. You weren't--the demon lied. Didn't it? Buffy?"

Buffy blinks. She looks up. She looks at everyone gathered outside the circle; she looks past them, at the living room, the arches leading to the back hall and the front door; she looks at the art Mom chose that's still hanging on the walls, at the framed photos of Mom and Buffy and Dawn sitting on the desk and end tables. "I'm here," she says, dazed, almost to herself. "I'm here," she repeats, like it hurts, and Dawn's thin thread of hope snaps. She watches the realisation widen Buffy's eyes, the shock flood her face. The awful grief that follows, that overwhelms.

* * *

Willow's voice gets high and reedy when she cries. It carries.

It doesn't have to carry far for Dawn to hear it. Not in the quiet of the middle of the night.

"I screwed it up. I screwed it all up, Tara, I made it all worse--she was _dead_ and I made it _worse_ \--"

"Shh, Willow, shh." Tara's voice is low and soft. Dawn fists her hands in her bedsheets and waits for her to say something comforting, something forgiving. Something like, "It's okay," or, "It's not your fault."

She doesn't. Dawn loves her for it.

* * *

Dawn's been out of school for a month when Tara puts her foot down and makes her go back.

She has a lot of work to catch up. At first, she chafes under the expectation that she's actually going to do it: because it's a month's worth of homework and she's a teenager, but also because it just seems so _stupid_ , in almost the exact same way school and homework and everything else that was normal felt stupid right after she found out she was the Key. But a page and a half into some math or science worksheets, or a couple chapters into To Kill A Mockingbird\--when she realises she's gone ten or twenty whole minutes thinking only about simple, straightforward things like how to find the area of two-dimensional shapes, or drawing Punnett squares, or racism--it's a relief. An almost but not quite guilty relief.

It's just easier to stay late at the library, or to shut herself up in her room with her mountain of catch-up work as soon as she gets home. If Tara recognises her super-studiousness as the excuse it is, she doesn't say anything. If Willow does, Dawn doesn't care.

She likes reading. She can get into reading more easily than her other homework, and it loses time for her better than almost anything else.

One night, when she finishes her take-home history quiz and picks up her book for a bedtime chapter or two, it's nearly ten; when the low murmur of an accented voice from down the hall drags her out of Tom Robinson's trial, it's after midnight. She lays there listening to the unintelligible mumble for a few minutes before marking her place in the book and rising out of bed.

The caught-red-handed look Spike gives her when she pushes open Buffy's door and slips into her room is kind of hilarious. But Buffy's the same as she always is anymore--sitting silently, her eyes downcast, her hands limp in her lap--so it's not hard not to laugh at him. "Hey."

He's perched on the end of Buffy's bed, practically glowing in the dark where his creature-of-the-night skin and peroxide-dead hair catch the faint moonlight from outside. "What are you doing up?" he asks. His tone aims for cool, but Dawn can tell he's one pointed remark away from escaping out the window. "It's late. All good sisters should be tucked up in bed."

"I was. I heard you."

His eyes widen even as he glares. "It's not polite to eavesdrop, you know," he scolds, arch and superior and covering his flustered embarrassment really, really badly.

Dawn raises a skeptical eyebrow. "You're gonna lecture me on good manners."

He draws himself up, looking offended. "Time was, people put stock in good manners. Poncy gits, mostly, but sometimes, they had a point. Like about listening in on totally innocent one-sided conversations."

Dawn wants to raise another eyebrow at 'totally innocent'. Instead, she rolls her eyes and takes pity on him. "Relax," she says, crossing to take her own seat on the edge of the bed. "I heard your voice, not what you were saying."

"Oh." Belatedly, he adds, "Good," one final word of righteous indignation before he drops the whole act. Dawn swallows a smile.

They sit together on their opposite corners of the bed, Buffy propped up on her pillows behind them with all the presence of the bot plugged in to recharge. It's...almost nice. Spike hasn't been around as much lately as he was when Buffy was--before Buffy came back. And when he is around, most of the time he's quiet. Or angry. Or both. It's not like Dawn blames him--quiet and angry describe her pretty well these days, too--but.

She's missed him.

"Used to sit like this with Dru," he says eventually, too casual. "After that bloody mob in Prague. She'd be makin' up constellations, naming invisible angels, living in her head more than usual. Slayer's not so different." After a pause, he amends, "Quieter."

Dawn wants to turn her head, look at Buffy, check to see if anything's changed, even something tiny. It's a familiar urge. Instead, she looks down at her hands where they're folded self-consciously in her lap. "Has she...?"

Spike shifts, moving the mattress faintly. Shaking his head, maybe, or letting his shoulders fall. "Not a flicker."

"How did..." Dawn's fingertips pluck at a wrinkle in the knee of her stripy pyjama pants. "After the mob. How did Drusilla...get better?"

She can feel him watching her. "Well," he says deliberately, "there was a ritual."

Her hands close into fists. "No," she says, and her voice is hard in the quiet of Buffy's room, her words like stones. "No more spells."

"No one's suggesting any, pet."

She doesn't even hear what he says, because how he says it makes her so mad. He sounds so careful. Everyone always sounds so careful when they talk to her--they've sounded like that for months, ever since Buffy died--and she doesn't get it. She doesn't understand how they can be so careful about _choosing their words_ when they'll cast spells as thoughtlessly as breathing. "Why does everybody always just jump to magic? It never does any good. It never helps!"

"Dawn--"

"No!" Launching off the bed, she whirls to square off against him, his careful voice, his kind eyes, his stupid soulless sympathy that's probably more imitation than anything real. She jabs a finger towards Buffy, who just keeps staring at her limp hands. "Look what it did to her! She was in--and they made her come back, and--and she didn’t want to come back. Why would she come back? Why would she want to?" And then, as if dredged up by everything else spitting out of her mouth, the fearful, terrible thing that's been living inside her for weeks--worming in her gut and souring the root of her tongue and lurking around the hard, dark edges of her mind--wrenches its way out: "What if she never comes back?"

For a long, ringing moment, Spike doesn't answer. Then: "She is back, Niblet," he says, more gently than she's ever heard him say anything. "She's right here."

Dawn's banked rage turns to smoke, coring her in an instant. She blinks, shocked. Hot tears spill onto her cheeks.

"Dawn--" Spike begins again, pushing to his feet, but she shakes her head and backs away and turns and flees to her own room.

* * *

School passes around her the next day. Dawn's friends are bright, careless blurs in the halls and at lunch; her teachers are the adults in Charlie Brown cartoons. She doesn't take a single note in any of her classes.

At the end of the day she goes straight home and helps Tara make dinner and eats beside Buffy at the table and washes the dishes with Xander on drying duty trying too hard to make her laugh. When asked, she says, "No homework tonight," and either sells the lie or has been worrying everybody too much for them to challenge it. She watches TV with everyone until ten o'clock, and then she takes a deep breath and stands and takes Buffy's hand before Tara can.

"I'll take her," she says, and pulls Buffy to her feet and leads her away and ignores the feeling of being watched all the way upstairs.

Buffy's bedtime routine isn't very different from what it was when the demon was hitching a ride. She gets her face washed, her hair brushed, and toothpaste put on her toothbrush, which is then held in her hand until she either takes it and does the actual brushing herself, slowly and apathetically, or doesn't. Really, the only difference is that instead of staring vacantly at nothing no matter what happens right in front of her face, now Buffy stares down at her hands, or into the sink, or at the floor.

Dawn wonders if it's because Buffy doesn't want to see anything around her, or because she can't bear to.

In Buffy's room, Dawn helps her into her sushi pyjamas and into bed, and then tells her, "I'll be right back," and hurries down the hall to her own room to change into her own pjs.

Her set is printed with mermaids. Mom gave them to her the same Christmas she gave Buffy her sushi set. She and Buffy put them on right after opening them, and made Mom change back into her own pyjamas, and they all spent that entire Christmas Day lounging around the house dressed for bed.

Now, Dawn's almost grown out of her mermaids. They land too high on her wrists and ankles, and are tight at the shoulders and waist. She'd thought about bundling them up for donation over the summer; she'd thought about it every time she thought about eventually having to clean out Buffy's closet. Willow always changed the subject whenever she brought it up, though, so it never got around to happening.

"We're having a sleepover," she announces when she returns to Buffy's room, hugging her own pillow to her chest. "Unless you wanna tell me to get out of your room and leave you alone?" She says it lightly, like it's a joke. She's proud of herself for somehow managing not to sound like she's forcing it.

Buffy says nothing. She does nothing. She lies right where Dawn left her, reclining on her pillows, staring at her lap.

Dawn closes the door behind herself and turns off the light and goes to the bed. She plumps up her pillow and puts it beside Buffy's, gets into the empty side of the bed, and lies on her back staring up at the ceiling.

She thinks about apologizing. She could explain that she was tired and upset, that she didn't mean--that she'd just assumed, once they got rid of the demon--

She'd assumed that once they got rid of the demon, Buffy would be the way she used to be. That she'd be quippy and defiant and strong. That they could all go back to the way things were before, like nothing had changed.

She thinks what she needs to apologize for isn't her outburst, but her assumptions.

Beside her, Buffy's human-warm and soft and breathing. She's wearing her sushi pyjamas. She's not possessed, and she's not the bot. She's alive. She's here.

Dawn thinks, _The hardest thing in this world is to live in it._

"I wish things weren't so hard for you," she says softly. Turning onto her side, she hugs Buffy around the waist and tucks her head on Buffy's shoulder. "But if...Buffy, if you're...done, that's okay. You can be done. What matters is that you're here." She hugs her a little tighter. "I'm just really glad you're here."

She doesn't notice Buffy's downturned gaze lifting slowly to rest on the top of her head, or Buffy's fingers curling lightly around a mermaid on her sleeve.


End file.
